The LaTeX Project (aka LaTeX3 Project)

The LaTeX project maintains and develops the LaTeX typesetting system. In a separate article we provide a more detailed description of what we aim to achieve and how you can help us to achieve the project goals. Some older reports from the early days of the project (mainly of historical interest) are available from the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) as ltx3pub. More recent work is available from this site as articles (in PDF format) and information about the current development code can be found on a separate page.

The experience gained from the production and maintenance of LaTeX2e (the version you have been using for many years) had a major influence on our goals for future development and on new code which is now integrated into LaTeX.

A while ago we made the decision to drop the idea of a separate LaTeX3 format that would exist in parallel to LaTeX2e, but instead decided to gradually modernize LaTeX to keep it competitive in today’s world while maintaining compatibility methods for older documents.

As part of this change of focus the following major improvements have been introduced in the last few years:

• 2018: Full support for Unicode input; UTF-8 became the default encoding in LaTeX;
• 2019: Introduction of the LaTeX development formats to allow people to try out upcoming releases with ease;
• 2020: Integration of the L3 programming layer into the LaTeX format; the first uses of this layer inside the format are a new general hook management system for LaTeX, and the xparse document commands (formerly available as a package);
  Interface extensions to NFSS (The LaTeX font selection scheme) to better support modern fonts (OpenType and others).

At the TUG conference 2020 we also announced the start of a multi-year project (financially supported in part by Adobe) to provide LaTeX support for the straightforward production of ‘tagged PDF’. This form of PDF is required to support “Accessibility” (as in the PDF/UA standard) and other uses of PDF that require structural information.

For more details about this project take a look at our page on accessibility and tagging, in particular the two articles “Quo vadis LaTeX(3) Team — A look back and at the upcoming years” and “LaTeX Tagged PDF — A blueprint for a large project” as well as the “LaTeX Tagged PDF Feasibility Evaluation Study”. Updates and status reports will be added there as they become available.

We are quite excited about this project, because it offers the chance to make LaTeX unique not just for its unsurpassed quality in math typesetting, paragraph breaking, etc., but also in future, the ability to produce structured documents without manual labor — so stay tuned on the progress.